David Lai's Business Intelligence Blog

Custom BW hierachy level selection in WEBI

Connecting to BW using a BICS connection in WEBI is pretty cool, but unfortunately the ability to select a desired level from a hierarchy proves to be very difficult without any tricks. A common request that I’ve been finding from clients these days is the ability to select a desired level in a hierarchy and not have to expand all the way through in order to see that level. (more…)

Demystifying LCM Overrides

The LCM Overrides tool is very powerful as it allows administrators to manage the migration of server host settings from environment to environment very easily. For example if Dev used a different database vs QA, it would be a hassle to manually change the connection setting every time a universe was migrated.  Well with LCM Overrides, we can automatically have QA attach to different database settings...

How to unlock jsps so that we can edit them in BI4

I’d like to present a neat little trick to unlocking the jsps in BI4. By default if we try to edit any of the jsps (ie: login.jsp from BI Launchpad), nothing happens and we keep getting the same default page.  I think SAP does this so that people don’t go mucking around with the jsps and then harrass technical support when their application fails. Try it out for yourself by editing the...

How to bypass the BI Launchpad logon screen

For those of you who need a quick reference on how to bypass the BI Launchpad logon screen, here it is. There are many reasons why you may want to bypass the BI Launchpad logon screen. For example, you may want to use trusted authentication, single sign on, or have users go through a special system account. In this article we will go through a step by step on how to bypass the BI Launchpad logon screen...

How to bypass the Central Management Console (CMC) logon screen

I’ve seen many posts in forums asking how to bypass the CMC (Central Management Console) logon screen ie: (how to logon infoview bypass the logon screen) , and unfortunately there has not been one solution posted.   Recently with the help of Jeremy Ma from SAP Support, I’ve discovered the solution for BI4 that I would like to share. There are several situations on when you may want to...

My Xcelsius Rant – Is there any hope for SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards in the next little while?

In this article I’d like to express my concerns about SAP BusinessObjects Dashboard Design AKA Xcelsius for what I’ve seen in the last 2 years. With SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards FP3 I was hoping to see some light; unfortunately it’s been quite dismal. When I first started using Xcelsius in 2006, it was leading edge and produced dashboards that had the WOW factor that other dashboard...

Hidden feature WSDL Generator

Recently with one of my client BI4 implementations I’ve been doing a lot of patch upgrades and external application installations (ie: explorer). Apparently it seems whenever some sort of upgrade is done on the server, some of the existing BI Web Services stop working. For example the definition from the BI service gives the following error when I open it up in Internet Explorer WSDLException:...

Using Xcelsius and Webservices to insert comments into a database

A common request that I have seen with my clients, is the ability to enter comments into a dashboard and then view those comments when they re-open the dashboard in the future. Unfortunately Xcelsius does not have a native mechanism to send data back to the database, as a dashboard’s main purpose to read data and not write back to the database.  However, I do see the value in being able to persist...

Bursting Reports in Business Objects to Dynamic Recipients

This post is a continuation of my previous post on Bursting Reports in Business Objects The difference here is that instead of distributing the reports to Business Objects users, we’ll be able to dynamically control our user list that we will distribute our reports to externally. Dynamic Recipients are often used with Crystal Reports that are not connected to a Universe and do not have BOBJ...